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In November 2011, we organized an iWeekend University event in the installations of Wayra in Madrid. They also sponsored the event by paying for the food. It was a runaway success.

Now, 5 months later, Wayra announces Wayra Weekend, a copy of iWeekend University. It is being organized by the same group of young people and the most shocking thing is that they are calling the previous event of iWeekend University as “the previous edition of Wayra Weekend”. Not only that, they are also using the video of iWeekend University and have done a shameless copy-paste of the legal terms and conditions and the agenda of our event in Madrid. Even the image and the photos are from our event. Due to this reason, it has been called in twitter (in Spanish) “an epic copy-paste by Wayra of iWeekend”. We didn’t have any news of this event until we saw it online.

iWeekend University Home v/s Wayra Weekend Home

V/S

Compare the below snapshots from Wayra Weekend with the content in our website of iWeekend University Madrid :

Clearly, Wayra is aware of all this and is allowing all this to happen. Can entrepreneurs trust in a company that shamelessly plagiarizes a project like iWeekend, born out of the community of entrepreneurs? No entrepreneur should present his/her idea to an accelerator/incubator whose values and principles are based on a shaky foundation. Something that is ethically wrong cannot be good for entrepreneurs or the society in general.

This message comes from an entrepreneur who has lived and is living the struggle of scaling up his project. Clearly, there is a lack of real support for entrepreneurs in Spain. If we continue like this, we will continue getting what we have got until now. The least we need are good examples.

I’ve been an iweekend participant (now future iweekend host) and winner, and wayra startup finalist. I have no idea what to write. This whole situation with two entities that have given me so much hurts me deeply. Having known wayra from the inside, or at least, the people, changed the impression I had about its parent company Telefonica (to a better one). At first I though it was a rumor, or that wayra and iweekend were working together. Upon confirming the sad report, I feel really disappointed. Back to the starting point with Telefonica.